Everybody Digs Bill Evans
Director – Grant Gee – 2025 – UK / Ireland – Cert. 15 – 102m
*****
Following the unexpected death of his trio’s bass player in a car crash, jazz pianist Bill Evans finds himself incapable of playing – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 11th
Director Gee has a clear empathy for the worlds of music and musicians, with documentaries Meeting People is Easy (1998), about Radiohead touring to promote their album OK Computer, and Joy Division (2007). The current film represents his first foray into the narrative feature.
It opens with a recreation of a number from Evans’ 1961 New York Village Vanguard gig – the Bill Evans Trio with Evans (Anders Danielssen Lie from The Summer Book, Charlie McDowell, 2024; Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021; The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier, 2021) on piano, Scott LeFaro (Will Sach) on bass, and Paul Motian (Boz Martin-Jones) on drums – two recordings of which were released as the highly regarded LPs Sunday at the Vialllage Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. As reel to reel spools rotate, so too do car wheels, specifically those carrying LeFaro to his death in a car crash 11 days later. The way these scenarios merge indicates that Evans lives and breathes music; with LeFaro’s death, he enters a sort of limbo where he becomes isolated from that artistic life force.
He is also a heroin addict, something which went with the territory at that time unless you made a point of refusing it.
His elder brother Harry Evans Jr. (Barry Ward), a family man who is also based in New York and has a wife Pat (Katie McGrath) and a young daughter Debby (Tallulah Cavanaugh, and later played as an adult by Isabelle Harriet), invites him to move in while he gets himself together. Bill makes regular trips out into the night alone to obtain his supplies of junk. Although Debby adores her uncle, who named a composition after her, Harry eventually has had enough, and asks his brother to leave.
All this time, the film has felt like a series of dark nighttime views. However it shifts visual gear as Bill spends an extended period of time with his parents Harry
(Bill Pullman from Lost Highway, David Lynch, 1997; Independence Day, Roland Emmerich, 1996; Spaceballs, Mel Brooks, 1987) and Mary (Laurie Metcalf from God, the Devil and Bob, TV series, 2000; Toy Story, John Lasseter, 1995; Desperately Seeking Susan, Susan Siedelman, 1985) in their modest Florida home. Here he seems able to operate in daylight hours, and the film feels brighter, even though his old man takes him to the local watering hole some evenings, seemingly to show off his successful, talented son.
The brightness of the Florida sequences is all the more remarkable given that the film was entirely shot in Ireland.
If Anders Danielssen Lie turns Bill Evans into a shadowy, haunted figure, beside whom his elder brother pales, Pullman and Metcalf as his parents provide quite a contrast, his father at once proud and resentful of the lifetime of hard work which has paid for the couple’s retirement home, his mother imparting such snippets of homespun wisdom as, sometimes the intermission is part of the music.
Eventually Bill’s time there too must come to an end, so he returns to New York and his girlfriend Ellaine (Valene Kane) who in no time at all has him back doing heroin with her. It’s a reminder of the jazz musician’s world at that time and its attendant temptations.
Director Gee, cameraman Piers McGrail and editor Adam Biskupski turn the whole thing into a sumptuous, mostly black & white visual tone poem that somehow seems a fitting tribute to such a seminal figure in the world of jazz, even though it covers a period of his life when he was barely playing.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 11th.
Trailer: